Funferal

Westlife lose trademark case – to tobacco firm

This is bizarre. I’m no fan of Westlife as a ‘musical’ group but I can’t help feeling they’ve been wronged here. The EU’s Court of First Instance has annulled the decision to grant the band an EU trademark in the word Westlife – on the grounds that a German tobacco firm holds a trademark on the word West. The article points out that the Westlife application was in a different class to the West trademark. Seemingly the German trademark is in West alone and in combination with a number of other terms. Life is not a word in German, and Westlife is not one of the combination terms covered in the tobacco firm’s trademark but the Court believed there was too much risk of confusion, as the word life might be known to Germans.
Am I the only one to see the irony in thinking that consumers might believe that a tobacco firm had incorporated LIFE into its trademark?